800 top minds together in Maastricht
From 24 to 28 July, over 650 game theorists from all over the world will come together for the 5th World Congress of the Game Theory Society. This World Congress is held only once every four years; earlier editions took place in Bilbao, Marseilles, Evanston and Istanbul. Game theory is a mathematical discipline that centres on decision-making. It deals with models of conflict, competition and cooperation, in which each party is focused on achieving its own individual aims. The societal importance of this field of research is evidenced by the large number of game theorists who have won a Nobel Prize in economics. These include: Nash (known from the film A Beautiful Mind), Selten, Harsanyi (1994), Aumann, Schelling (2005), Hurwicz, Maskin, Myerson (2007), Roth, Shapley (2012), and Tirole (2014). Three of these Nobel laureates are also scheduled to speak at the Congress.
Robert J. Aumann (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005 Nobel laureate), Eric Maskin, (Harvard University, 2007 Nobel laureate) and Roger Myerson (University of Chicago, 2007 Nobel laureate) will each deliver a brief reading (similar to a TED talk) during a special Nobel session at the Theater aan het Vrijthof, from 11.00 to 14.00 on Monday 25 July. These readings will touch on topics including the presidential elections in the United States, consciousness and types of balance.
Parallel to the World Congress, the same team of Maastricht scientists have organised the 17th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC16), in which social and economic interaction on the Internet will take centre stage. Participants will include members of the research divisions of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and eBay. The themes of this conference have numerous aspects in common with game theory and will attract an additional 150 participants to Maastricht.
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On Friday afternoon, 18 October, Minister Eppo Bruins (Education, Culture, and Science) paid a working visit to Maastricht. There, he was briefed by Limburg's educational institutions on current educational topics from the Education Manifesto. The minister also engaged in conversations with teachers and students. Through practical examples, Bruins gained a clear understanding of how education in Limburg is joining forces and taking advantage of the opportunities presented by its border location. In addition, the Province of Limburg and the educational institutions expressed their concerns about government plans that do not sufficiently take these regional opportunities into account.
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On 15 October, education minister Bruins informed the Netherlands House of Representatives of his plans to reduce the number of international students in the Netherlands through the Internationalisation in Balance Act (‘Wet Internationalisering in Balans’). Maastricht University has serious concerns about this. The minister seems to completely ignore the need for appropriate policies that the education and business communities as well as the government of Limburg have constantly pointed out in recent times. Appropriate rules with an eye for regional differences are in fact a dire necessity to prevent educational barrenness in Limburg, and to train enough professionals for the tense labour market in the region and the Netherlands.
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This year, the total number of students at Maastricht University will probably still increase slightly to more than 23,000. Due to an estimated 3% decrease in the number of new students, this growth will level off. The ratio of Dutch to international students is also stabilising: among the new cohort, the proportion of Dutch students is increasing slightly. A large proportion of students still come from within Maastricht’s Euregion; over 50% of students come from within a 100-kilometre radius of Maastricht.